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Alvin Lucier – I am sitting in a room. Listening Report

 

“I am sitting in a room” by Alvin Lucier takes ordinary speech and transforms it with the help of “the natural resonance frequencies of the room” into a smoothened high-pitched pattern of sounds. Practically, I think this means that he used loudspeakers and microphones to stack the slightly changed tracks on top of each other. A process that is nowadays easy to replicate with computer programs, but without the natural resonance of spaces.

Lucier, the producer, and speaker persists in the fact that this is “not a demonstration of a physical fact, but to smooth out any irregularities his speech has.” Everything, except the presence of rhythm, should be “destroyed”.

Besides the smoothen out of his tonal voice, I think the fact that there is a slight stuttering in his speech could be part of his intention. Most of his words get unrecognizable between the fourth and fifth rounds of overlapping sounds. Lucier’s voice gets altered with more echo and reverb. It sounds like a distant sound that gets gradually noisier until there are only rhythmic high-pitched sounds. In some of the video work I do as a freelancer, there is sometimes the need to find frequencies in the audio files that are irritating. With the help of an equalizer, a plugin in audio-editing software, these irritating frequencies can be pointed out. For me, those sounds picked up by the microphone sound like Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”. A possible explanation is that the microphone, even without layering tracks on top of each other, picks up that “natural resonance of the room”.

All in all, an interesting showcase of how natural resonance can change sounds and makes the fact clear that we are surrounded by altering conditions of nature.  

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